AMD Unveils Carrizo APU Details

AMD first started dishing out details on Carrizo, the successor to Kaveri, during the closing months of 2014. Then earlier this year, at CES 2015 in Las Vegas, AMD waved the flag for their next gen APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). AMD is claiming that Carrizo, which is still built on Global Foundries’ 28nm Super High Performance (28SHP) process node like its predecessor, will nonetheless deliver huge advances in both performance and efficiency.

In time for this week’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, AMD has prepared a presentation on its Carrizo accelerated processing unit– which packs four Excavator x86 cores and eight Radeon GPU cores for laptops and similar gear. Made especially for notebooks, convertibles and similar devices, the new mobile “Carrizo” model APU utilizes new energy-efficient “Excavator” cores and combines the APU and Southbridge on a single die for the first time.

“As a part of our continued focus on building great products, the advanced power and performance optimizations we have designed into our upcoming ‘Carrizo’ APU will deliver the largest generational performance-per-watt gain ever for a mainstream AMD APU,” Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow and co-author of the ISSCC presentation, said in a statement.

From a hardware standpoint, Carrizo will be combining a number of Excavator modules, AMD’s R-Series GCN GPUs, and the chipset/Fusion Controller Hub into a single package, bringing with it full HSA compatibility, TrueAudio, and ARM Trustzone compatibility. As with Kaveri before it, Carrizo will be built on Global Foundries’ 28nm Super High Performance (28SHP) node, making Carrizo a pure architecture upgrade without any manufacturing changes. Today’s ISSCC paper in turn builds on these revelations, showing some of the data from AMD’s internal silicon testing.

AMD has also worked its magic on the graphics core, achieving an 18 percent reduction in leakage that allows for a 20 percent reduction in power usage at the same clock frequency as the previous generation graphics core. AMD can also opt for a 10 percent clock frequency boost at the same power levels.

So we might expect something from AMD’s box this time! Do tell us what do you think about it through comments below.